Boot Camp For Top Cops

The Fbi Academy Trains The Best Of Local Police Officers To Work Smart, Play For Keeps And Stay Alive

May 18, 1993|By Michael Kilian.

QUANTICO, Va. — Even cops play cops and robbers.

They come from all over the world to take part in a deadly serious version of the good guy-bad guy game at the FBI National Academy, deep in the Virginia woods 35 miles south of Washington.

Part Marine boot camp, part college campus, the academy offers some of the most physically stressful and intellectually demanding training police officers could expect to get. They learn and practice arrest and gunfight techniques at Hogan's Alley, a full-scale copy of an American town (named for an 1890s comic strip about young hooligans who play cops and robbers in the street) where trainees hunt down bad guys. They study courses as diverse as psychology, microcomputer technology and budget accounting.

And they seem to love every minute of it-both the shoot-'em-ups and the numbers crunching.

"Aside from marriage and being in the delivery room for the births of my children, this was the most satisfying experience of my adult life," said Sgt. Brian Oakes of Chicago's 5th Police District, who completed an 11-week training course at the academy last summer.

"You come back home after going through the academy and guys ask if they can kiss your ring," said Rolling Meadows Deputy Police Chief Doug Larsson, who completed his training this spring. "They're just kidding around, but in all seriousness, the people who are lucky enough to get this academy training are an elite."

They also may stand a better chance of staying alive. Just ask Detective Sgt. Pat Stephens of the Cleveland Police Department. He went through a training course here last winter as a member of a joint FBI-Cleveland Police Department task force dealing with fugitives.

Back home on active duty Feb. 4, he and two other members of his team responded to a tip that an armed and dangerous man wanted on multiple charges was holed up in an apartment with several innocent relatives.

When they arrived, Stephens and his partners found that the apartment was at the top of a long flight of stairs with no landing or stairwell to hide behind. Using techniques they learned at Hogan's Alley, they got to the door without being detected. But when they tried to force it open, the fugitive locked it with a deadbolt, warning them: "You'll have to kill me!"

Working with entry tools, the officers managed to get and keep the deadbolt unlocked long enough to push the door-and a dresser that had been shoved up against it-back several inches.

In the movies, they might then have charged into the place with guns blazing. But in his Hogan's Alley scenarios, Stephens had learned the "quick peek."

"You stick your head in for just a fraction of a second-just long enough for what your eye picks up to register," he said in an interview. "Then you pull back and decide what you saw. Then you respond accordingly."

What Stephens saw in that instant was that the 6-foot-7 fugitive was standing just a few inches to the side of the door. He held a carving knife in one hand and a carving fork in the other, both poised in the air.

When the fugitive angrily refused to drop the knife as ordered, Stephens took another quick peek while bringing his 9 mm automatic pistol to bear just below.

"I shot once, and hit him dead center in the chest," Stephens said. "I missed his heart by an inch."

No one else was hurt.

College credit and gunfire

The FBI academy is available to any sworn law-enforcement officer, though Chicago restricts its candidates to those with the rank of sergeant or above. Affiliated with the University of Virginia, the academy provides a wide variety of college-credit police-science courses, and in many ways resembles a college campus-except that the students tend to be older and beefier than most, and during the day the sylvan setting rattles and echoes with what seems like continuous gunfire.

Trainees tend to emerge less beefy. A rigorous physical training course is required for those in the full 11-week program.

"I could barely (run) a mile and a half at first," Larsson said. "At the end, I was running 12 miles with ease. And now I run about 4 miles every day."

The FBI has taken a lot of heat over the years-for spying on private citizens during the Kennedy and Johnson years, for its entanglement in Watergate, for revelations concerning the late Director J. Edgar Hoover's blackmail-vulnerable sexual habits and the current Director William Sessions' spending practices, for its handling of the bloodily concluded Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas.

But its academy, founded in 1935 and now occupying a complex of modern high-rise buildings, has long been a source of pride for the agency-and a source of strength, knowledge and skills for ordinary cops out in the field.